Products tailored for home use and for other small networks include user interfaces that are customized for a particular device installation. Configuration pages for each network device are typically designed based on the particular network device capabilities. Typically, the user interface installations are hosted on devices via HyperText Markup Language (HTML), such as a web server stored on the network device. The user interfaces are often dependent on Java Script or another type of browser-based mechanism for network device error checking.
These types of network device user interface installations add costs to deployment of the network devices. Also, the network devices have limited processor and storage resources.
While standardization, localization, and verification are areas where there is a need for improved user interfaces, maintaining a standard user interface across multiple devices and multiple revisions and upgrades of such devices from various vendors is a difficult and complex problem. Standard interfaces may have a common display but due to error checking programming and other coding differences, the user interfaces may not act the same. For each language a network device needs to support, a new firmware file is often created. For example, a router model could have several different firewall versions, such as versions in English, German or French. Some network devices support multiple languages but the number of languages is limited based on the amount of memory and since the language file is local, the language file may be difficult to modify.